Birthing options: Expert biographies

Caroline Flint has been a midwife for 33 years and an NCT Teacher for 41 years. She was inspired by the birth of her first baby at home and says that it was the "most wonderful experience of my life".

She has dedicated her life to helping other women to have the same sort of ecstatic, empowering experience which she feels has formed her character, given her confidence and endorsed her as a woman and as a mother.

22 years ago she set up the first Birth Centre in the country (www.Birthcentre.com) - a quiet, intimate and private birthing place where women have access to water pools at all times and where they can labour in darkened and comfortable birthing rooms with understanding and gentle midwives.

Pat O’Brien has been a Consultant & Honorary Senior Lecturer in Obstetrics and Gynecology at University College London Hospitals since 1999. He qualified as a doctor in Ireland, but all his postgraduate training has been in London.

He specializes in Maternal Medicine and high-risk obstetrics, and at UCLH jointly runs a multi-disciplinary antenatal clinic involving consultants in Fetal Medicine, Cardiology, Hematology, Diabetes, Anaesthesia, and an Obstetric Physician.

He has a particular interest in medical complications of pregnancy, and this is the focus of many of his publications. He lectures widely in the UK and abroad, and runs courses on fetal monitoring, medical problems on the delivery suite, and psychiatric problems in pregnancy.

He is a reviewer for the Cochrane Collaboration and several medical journals. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and the BJM. He examines for the DRCOG examination. He is a member of the obstetric guideline development group of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK.

He also works with BBC Television (British Broadcasting Corporation) as an obstetric adviser.